Religion: A Trumpet for All Israel

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Wrapped in his long-fringed, white prayer shawl, and dressed in a white linen robe, Rabbi Finkelstein stood on the dais; looking to the East, with his back to the congregation, he faced the Ark of the Covenant. On the lectern before him lay the great scrolls of the Torah, the book of the law of Moses. Rabbi Finkelstein’s clenched right hand beat upon his breast in the traditional gesture of sorrow. Clear and strong, in the twang and guttural of the Hebrew chant, his voice rose:

“Elohenu velohe abotenu —Our God and, God of our fathers, let ourprayer come before thee;hide not thyself from our supplication, for we are not arrogantand stiff-necked, that we should say before thee, O Lord our Godand God of our fathers, we are righteous and have not sinned; butverily, we have sinned.”

Thus in Manhattan, and in almost every other corner of the world, one day this week, as they have for thousands of years, Jews prayed to the God of their fathers. It was the most dreadful and solemn day of the solemn and dreadful Jewish Year—Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. During the ten-day period of penitence beginning with Rosh Hashanah, tradition teaches, each man’s deeds are judged in heaven, to be punished or rewarded in the year ahead.

It is for this that Jews call the ten days the Yamin Noraim—the Days of Fear. But when the trumpet call of the ram’s-horn shofar has split the air for the last time on Yom Kippur, the mood traditionally changes to one of joy and hope. The New Year has indeed begun.

For Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, teacher of future rabbis at Manhattan’s Jewish Theological Seminary and leader of perhaps the most influential school of Jewish theology in the U.S. today, the shofar will herald the most stirring joy and hope of a lifetime. For he believes—and on abundant evidence—that U.S. Jews are returning to their synagogues and temples as never before.

The old, half-deserted synagogues are filling up again, new congregations are forming, new synagogues are being built. Young married couples are sending their children to religious schools to learn the fundamentals of their faith—then forming study groups so that they will know what their children are talking about. The word that such young Americans use, over & over again, when they are asked what they are looking for, is “heritage.”

“When I was a seminary student 40 years ago,” says Finkelstein, “it seemed so clear to us that our faith could not survive here that we even wondered for what purpose in the Divine Economy the Jews had been brought to the New World.” The ghetto and the pogrom had annealed Judaism in the hearts of countless generations of Jews, almost since the great dispersion. But in the freedom and prosperity of the Melting Pot, that branded faith seemed to be fading out. Says Finkelstein:

“Then came a tragedy which none of us had foreseen. The great First Century Rabbi Eliezer once said: ‘The Messiah will never come until the Jewish people repent.’ When they asked him, ‘What if the Jews do not repent?’ he answered: ‘The Lord will raise up a king worse than Haman* to smite them, and then they will repent.’ This is just what happened. Hitler was something we never thought possible.

“I remember how stricken we were when 47 Jews were killed in a pogrom in the Ukraine. We had days of mourning and fasting. But six million! That dreadful calamity—and the whole spiritual and material crisis of our time—are bringing American Jews back to the faith of their fathers.”

The Law Endures. There is no one spokesman for U.S. Judaism, no central authority, no High Priest. All good Jews, in varying degrees of literalness, believe in the Law, but U.S. Judaism is a spectrum shading off by minute gradations from ultra-orthodoxy to ultra-modernism. In this spectrum, Finkelstein, a traditionalist with one keen, dark eye on the future, stands almost dead center.

Judaism’s spectrum can be roughly divided into three parts, roughly equal in number of active followers† and reflecting three traditions in U.S. Judaism:

Orthodox Judaism tries to maintain the letter of the Law. To the outsider it sometimes looks like literalness and nothing else. It is a religion that demands strict, hour-by-hour adherence to sacred custom. Promptly at sundown each Friday night, the Sabbath begins, and Orthodox Jews are required to be indoors (to travel in a vehicle on the Sabbath is counted as a sin). Twenty minutes before sundown, the housewife lights the candles which will burn through the Sabbath’s 24 hours; any other lights must be turned on before that time. Synagogue services are entirely in Hebrew, and men & women sit apart, with their heads covered. The Orthodox Jew is expected to study the Torah every day and to observe the dietary laws with such strictness that separate plates and utensils must be used for cooking milk and meat dishes. On Yom Kippur, Orthodox Jews keep an absolute fast for 24 hours, and should spend about 13 hours at the synagogue in five services. Their strictly regulated life sets them apart from the rest of mankind, and is intended to: with a persistence undiminished by centuries, they feel themselves to be the Chosen People.

Reform Judaism in the U.S. is barely 75 years old. It was affected almost equally by 19th Century idealism and 19th Century skepticism. Its first leaders were German rabbis, some of whom carried the new doctrines to Britain, France and the U.S. Reform Jews pay scant attention to dietary laws, hold their services mainly in English, the principal one on Friday evening instead of Saturday (a few hold it on Sunday), and stress the ethical teachings of the prophets more than the ritual laws of Torah and Talmud. With the Reform Jews, the sense of being a chosen people is dim or extinct.

Conservative Judaism is newer still, and born in the U.S. It represents a middle way between Orthodox and Reform Judaism. Its founders considered Orthodoxy too adamantly withdrawn from U.S. life, Reform too spiritually attenuated. They fashioned a synagogue service in which English is used but Hebrew predominates. Men & women sit together, as they do in Reform congregations; the men cover their heads, as among the Orthodox. Conservative Jews are taught that, as Jews, they have been chosen by God for a spiritual purpose—but that those of other faiths, including Christians and Moslems, have also been chosen. Conservative Judaism is the middle ground on which Rabbi Finkelstein has taken his stand.

“Service Is Not Exclusive.” The citadel of Conservative Judaism is the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Rabbi Finkelstein has been its president for eleven years. With his flashing eyes, floating hair and black beard heavily streaked with grey, he looks, at 56, like a reasonable modern facsimile of an Old Testament patriarch. Sometimes he talks like one, sometimes like the scholar he is—and sometimes like the successful fund-raiser that he is, too.

His personal life is Orthodox enough to satisfy a Pharisee. Each morning he rises at 5 :30 so that he can attend synagogue services before breakfast. Then for an hour or two before the day’s work at the seminary, he prays and studies the Torah. Most of his faculty are equally observant of Jewish law and tradition. But Orthodox Jews are scandalized that some of the seminary’s 23-man board of directors are members of Reform synagogues.* And even some Conservative Jews are shocked at Finkelstein’s habit of inviting Christian theologians (e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, of Union Theological Seminary, just across the street) to talk to his students. President Finkelstein has an answer to such objectors: “The job of special service to God is not exclusive to the Jews.”

The Great Confession. Louis Finkelstein was born in Cincinnati on June 14, 1895. His father, Simon J. Finkelstein, a strong-minded Orthodox rabbi from Slobodka, Lithuania, moved to a congregation in Brooklyn when Louis was seven. It was there, in Brooklyn’s heavily Jewish Brownsville district, that Louis grew up.

The everyday routine in an old-school Orthodox home might make a Scotch Presbyterian Sunday seem frivolous. But Louis seemed to have been born with a rabbinical cap on his head. “I can’t remember a time,” he says, “when anything meant more than the study of the Law.”

Like every Orthodox Jewish boy, he first learned the great monotheistic confession of faith which every devout Jew hopes to have the strength to repeat on his deathbed: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” He learned the complex system of ritual blessings with which the Orthodox Jew sanctifies every important action of the day: the thanks on awakening (for the day, for the power of sight, for the creation of the earth, for the power to walk, for the renewal of his strength, for not being an idolator or a slave or a woman*), the blessings before & after meals, and the special thanks to be offered on such occasions as the sight of trees in springtime, the ocean, a rainbow, or the getting of new possessions.

He learned the 13 points of the creed of the great 12th Century rabbi, Maimonides, the Jewish Aristotle: the belief in God’s existence, in His unity, incorporeality, timelessness, and approachability through prayer; the belief in prophecy, in the superiority of Moses to all other prophets, in the revelation of the Law and its immutability, in Divine providence, Divine justice, the eventual coming of the Messiah; the belief in the resurrection and in everlasting life. He memorized the civil and canon law of the Talmud in great early-morning gulps, often leaving home at 5:30 a.m. to study in the synagogue before school. For at least an hour a day, with a rabbinical tutor, he puzzled out the vowelless Hebrew and the interpretations of the sacred text.

Baseball for Rabbis. Louis’ closest friend was another young Torah student almost as sobersided as himself. Solomon Goldman descended from a line of eleven rabbis. Now head of Anshe Emet synagogue in Chicago and one of the most respected scholars in U.S. Judaism, he remembers his friend Louis as painfully shy. In Goldman’s house he would often lower his head and walk past Goldman’s mother and sisters without a word. Goldman attributes this to Finkelstein’s piety: to walk with the head held high, Jewish tradition teaches, is bold and immodest.

For all his painful shyness, Louis Finkelstein was never backward when he had a cause. In order to counteract the drift of Brownsville away from the Torah, he and Sol Goldman launched an intense juvenile crusade — buttonholing youngsters, speaking on street corners, organizing study clubs, and lining up pledges to observe the Sabbath.

Finkelstein graduated from high school in three years, then moved on to New York’s City College. He was president of the student Zionist organization — and one of the few Jewish students on friendly terms with the boys in the Roman Catholic Newman Club. But he did not really find his element until he entered Jewish Theological Seminary.

There, his grasp of the Torah soon brought him to the attention of the faculty. White-maned Dr. Solomon Schechter, the seminary’s president, took special pains with the shy scholar. Walking with him on the street one day, Dr. Schechter stopped at a newsstand to read the latest World Series scores. “Can you play baseball?” he asked. “No,” admitted Finkelstein. “Remember this,” said the old man. “Unless you can play baseball, you’ll never get to be a rabbi in America.”

Scholar Finkelstein got the point and never forgot it — though he never played a game of baseball (or went to a dance, or had a date with a girl in his student days). He took enough interest in the outside world to get himself elected president of his class in its final year. In 1922 he married the sister-in-law of a faculty member, handsome Carmel Bentwich. He has three children: Hadassah, 28: now married to a mathematician and living in Connecticut; Ezra, 24, in his second year at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, and Emunah, 19, who is training for social work.

After graduating from the seminary, Finkelstein took a small congregation in The Bronx, where he stayed for twelve years. When he was midway in this work, the seminary’s next president, Cyrus Adler, persuaded him to join the faculty “for a year or two.” He stayed for 15 years, and when Adler died, 44-year-old Louis Finkelstein succeeded him.

Shift of Center. The seminary he was called to lead was neither the oldest nor the biggest in the U.S.* It was founded in 1887, with eight students and three teachers, then met in a small Spanish-Portuguese synagogue. When Louis Finkelstein took over in 1940, it had a set of handsome, six-story Georgian buildings on Manhattan’s academy-studded Morningside Heights — and perhaps the most distinguished faculty of rabbinical teachers in the English language. By the standards of 1940, it was turning out a fair number of graduates: eight or ten young rabbis a year, an equal number of qualified teachers for Jewish schools.

As he read the news from Europe, Louis Finkelstein saw a double challenge: 1) thanks to Hitler’s campaign against Jewish learning, the seminaries of Central and Eastern Europe (e.g., Berlin, Breslau, Vienna)were being wiped out of existence, and 2) the massacre of 6,000,000 European Jews was leaving U.S. Jewry, by simple default, the central Jewish community in the world. Jewish Theological Seminary has grown to meet those challenges as swiftly as possible. It now has 1,000 students enrolled in its four-year courses.

Zion Trouble. In exchanging the life of a teacher for that of an administrator, Finkelstein was true to one of the deepest currents of his faith. For Judaism is a this-worldly rather than an other-worldly religion; its basis is action rather than dogma. Obedience to the Law is far more important than belief. For the Law is truth set forth in terms of action.

As an administrator, a prominent citizen of the Jewish community, Finkelstein was bound to come to grips with Zionism. As a student, he had been attracted by it. But as he grew older, and the political preoccupations of the movement became clearer to him, his zeal for the establishment of a Jewish state began to cool.

The short-lived independence that Judas Maccabaeus ripped from the dying body of the Hellenistic Empire in the 2nd Century B.C. seemed to Finkelstein one of the great failures in Jewish history; so, he felt, would be a modern state established by force. Moreover, if U.S. Jews put as much effort into getting D.P.s admitted to the U.S. as they put into Zionism, he thought, a home could be found in the New World for all the dispossessed Jews of Europe.

By the time the Jews began their actual military struggle for Palestine, Louis Finkelstein was definitely a non-Zionist—a stand which looked to Zionists like anti-Zionism. At least one large contributor to the seminary tore up his usual check. Some of the faculty deeply resented Finkelstein’s attitude, and when he refused to let the students sing the Israel national anthem at commencement in 1945, on the ground that a political song has no place at a religious ceremony, the seminary nearly split apart.

Today, now that the issue has simmered down, Finkelstein feels that perhaps he was mistaken, and that the State of Israel may turn out to be a good thing, after all. Relations between the seminary and Israel are now cordial, and Finkelstein will do his best to keep them so.

Isaiah’s Meaning? This week, the directors of the seminary announced that Dr. Finkelstein will assume a new post as chancellor, and that his presidential duties will be taken over by a three-man team of two vice chancellors and the seminary provost. Louis Finkelstein hopes the arrangement will give him more time for scholarship, for writing and for travel. But most of all, he hopes it means more time to work for a renaissance of spiritual Judaism in U.S. life.

The auguries of such a renaissance are on all sides, he is sure. “It is not just a transient phenomenon. I predict that within 25 years the vast majority of the five million Jews in this country will have returned to their faith and will be keeping the Sabbath.

“I say 25 years, because the change will come mainly through the young people. Many of the fathers I know can’t understand what has happened to their children. A friend of mine who is a very successful industrialist is still amazed by the fact that his son is turning into a brilliant theologian; just a short time ago, I talked to the 16-year-old boy whose father runs a chain of retail stores. Father wants me to go into his business, he said. I am the only child. But why should I waste my life in business? I want to go to the seminary and become a rabbi.

“[Philosopher] Alfred North Whitehead once said to me: ‘What America needs is not a philosopher but a prophet.’ What I see and what I hope for the Jewish community in America is that it will give birth to a school of prophets and rise toward its own spiritual potential as a holy people. And this will have a profound effect on America and on the whole world. Even a tiny minority, when they are spiritually dedicated, can have a deep influence on the world around them—like the Essenes among the ancient Hebrews, or the Pharisees, or the early Christians, or the Quakers.

“To me, the prophetic message is summarized in the idea of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah.* The Christians take this to be the foreshadowing of Jesus Christ, but Jewish tradition sees it as the role of the Jews in the world. And the important part of the concept is the word ‘servant.’ Suffering, too, if necessary—and it often seems to be necessary. But suffering by itself is not enough.”

Impious Question. There must be action and example. One way in which U.S. Jews can serve their country and the world, says Finkelstein, is “by bringing people together and helping them understand each other.”

Finkelstein himself has done plenty to “bring people together.” In 1938, he helped found the Institute for Religious and Social Studies, a “graduate school” of clergymen and lay religious leaders, Christian and Jewish, which holds 13 sessions a year in Manhattan and six in Chicago. This year, for the twelfth time, he was elected president of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, which meets each year at Columbia University. “When I am at work on those enterprises,” he says, “I feel that I am obeying the commandments just as much as when I goto the synagogue for prayer.”

As they grow more spiritually minded, he thinks, U.S. Jews will more & more observe the Law’s injunction to make “peace between man and his fellow” a part of their religious duties. “When sometimes I am talking about this and someone asks me why we Jews should bear the burden when other groups don’t seem interested in doing anything, I consider it an impious question. Jews must see themselves as God intends them to be—His servants and the servants of mankind.”

Challenge & Paradox. For many Jews this will be a hard teaching. God has chosen them for a special purpose, but seemingly the price of God’s election has been a bitter portion. Exile, humiliation and persecution have dogged them through history, from Babylon to Buchenwald. Persecution has driven the Jews in upon themselves; they have sometimes set up barriers against the world simply in order to survive. But of what use is their survival, asks Louis Finkelstein, if their mission is forgotten?

The essence of that mission is a challenging paradox: to be a people set apart —and yet not apart. Louis Finkelstein calls on the withdrawn Jew to serve his old persecutors, his brothers, to join the human race; and calls on the assimilated Jew to take up his heritage.

In modern times, millions of men & women of Jewish origin have renounced Judaism as their spiritual country. Such men & women think (or say they think) that the word “Jew” should be on a par with “Baptist,” “Congregationalist” or “Catholic”—and should apply only to the Jews who have elected to be, or to remain, Jews. Rabbi Finkelstein’s Torah teaches him that the covenant God made with Israel is an inescapable covenant. “The choosing by God,” says he, “was like Selective Service.” It is binding on all Jews, to the last generation on earth.

Yom Kippur in this year 5712 was drawing to a close. In the synagogues of the world the chant went up: Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

Three times Rabbi Finkelstein and the congregation repeated: Blessed be His name, whose glorious Kingdom is for ever and ever. Seven times the shout arose: The Lord, he is God.

And the shofar of joy and hope sang in the ears of Israel its hoarse, triumphant cry.

*An enemy of the Jews whose story is told in the Book of Esther.† There is no agreement about the exact number of Orthodox, Reform and Conservative Jews. Best current estimates: about 175,000 “families” enrolled in U.S. Orthodox congregations, 140,000 in Reform congregations, 150,000 in Conservative congregations. But each group claims a large additional number of unenrolled worshipers. *Among them: U.S. Senator Herbert H. Lehman. *A Jewish woman, at this point in her morning prayers, humbly thanks God that He has created her according to His will. *Oldest and biggest: Hebrew Union College (Reform) in Cincinnati. * E.g., Isaiah 53:3-5: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised; and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”